About Jocelyn McWhirter

Book Review: Small Teaching Can’t get students’ attention at the beginning of class? Did they already forget what they learned two days ago? Two weeks ago? Feel like it’s too late to change anything at this point? James Lang would … Continue reading →

Book Review: When Grit Isn’t Enough If you’re a college student, when is grit not enough? When you’re not a white student in the middle-to-upper class. Linda Nathan, founding headmaster of the Boston Arts Academy, tracks some of her talented … Continue reading →

Book Review: The Discussion Book The subtitle says it all: “50 Great Ways to Get People Talking.” After a brief introduction, Stephen Brookfield and Stephen Preskill present 50 techniques one after the other, in no particular order. The order is … Continue reading →

The Vocabulary Crisis: How to Fix It Our students’ vocabularies inform both who they are and who they can be. Evidence suggests, however, that our students are reading less, hearing less conversation, and bringing a smaller vocabulary to college.1 Most … Continue reading →

Smart Phone Teaching I have always wanted my Introduction to Kinesiology students to experience firsthand how someone in my field would perform a particular skill in the real world. This presents an interesting and fun challenge. Last semester I was looking for ways to … Continue reading →

Three Miles “Less than one fifth finish in six years.” The statistic refers to “poor kids who make it to college.” The quotation is from Chana Joffe-Walt, a producer of the radio program This American Life. Jaffe-Walt hosted the show “Three … Continue reading →

What’s the Big IDEA? On January 8, we held our first annual student ratings of instruction party. What a nice way to spend a snowy day! Drew Dunham shared some great IDEA tricks for tracking numbers and interpreting student feedback. We learned … Continue reading →

Teaching Reflection: It’s Not about Cell Phones For years, I tried to find a way to reduce classroom cell phone use without increasing resentment. Like nearly all my best ideas, I stole this one from someone else. Here, most of … Continue reading →

WWKD? Here’s a report from the CTL “Teaching Unprepared Students” workshops, held September 27 and 28. In each workshop, we discussed three scenarios from this year’s Common Reading Experience book, Make Your Home among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet. We then asked: If Kathleen Gabriel, … Continue reading →

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